I had the day off yesterday and celebrated by going to the park with some friends. We played cards, listened to music, ate some chips and dip, and threw a baseball around. We played catch, getting farther and farther away from each other, and that eventually morphed into an impromptu game of Three Flies Up. I was jostling for position to catch a fly ball, slightly bumping into my friend, I raised my glove, missed the ball entirely, and had it land directly onto my eye with a sickening thud. THONK!! There was a blinding flash and my eye started swelling up immediately. My friends ran over in an instant, laughing and voicing concern simultaneously as good friends should do. One handed me an ice pack, another cracked open a beer for me, and another asked if I could see out of my eye, if I had a headache, or if my eye socket was broken.

It’s not a good feeling to catch a baseball with an eye. It sucks pretty hard. It’s like getting punched in the eye. I consider myself lucky though. As shitty as my reflexes are, I still managed to close my eye instead of having the baseball land directly on my eyeball. I didn’t get hit by the stitches and that would have caused even more damage. I didn’t break my eye socket, or my nose, or lose any of my teeth. If you’re going to catch a baseball with your face, that’s the way to do it.

I can still see out of my eye. It just feels better to let it be swollen shut. I called out of work today, and warned my managers of the dangers of playing catch in the park on your days off. I plan on icing my eye and trying various internet remedies to reduce the swelling. There’s one technique that involves putting cold tea bags on the eye, so I plan on tea bagging myself later. That should be fun. This is my first black eye. I managed to go thirty years without one. Let’s see if I can break that record this time around. I can only hope.